Quotes from Nikki Giovanni

If loneliness were a grape the wine would be vintage If it were a wood the furniture would be mahogany But since it is life it is Cotton Candy on a rainy day The sweet soft essence of possibility Never quite maturing from Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day

some say we are responsible for those we love others know we are responsible for those who love us

I am cotton candy on a rainy day the unrealized dream of an idea unborn from Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day

and perhaps my worst habit is overloving and like most who live to excess i will be broken in two by my unwillingness to control my feelings

The tragic loneliness black women consistently face as we stand before judgmental others—sometimes white, but sometimes black; sometimes male, but sometimes female—demands that we have some wisdom, experience, and some passion with which to combat this abuse.

sometimes when i wake up in the morning and see all the faces i just can't breathe from Sometimes

english isn't a good language to express emotion through mostly i imagine because people try to speak english instead of trying to speak through it

We in the Black Arts movement, which wasn't really a movement but a group of people who had similar objectives...

I don't think I'm allowed to kill something because I am frightened.

what we have here in this experience of America is a group of people who would not be downtrodden because they had a song to sing and we have a song to sing and there will be a new song for a new day but every day that there is a song we will sing it and our spirits will rise

A lot of people resist transition and therefore never allow themselves to enjoy who they are. Embrace the change, no matter what it is; once you do, you can learn about the new world you're in and take advantage of it.-Nikki Giovanni

I know this it is difficult to grow up it always was it always will be I know this nobody can tell you how to do it You just make the same mistakes and You just thrill to the same excitement I know this Life is a good idea

shame the bad comfort the good do the rosa parks just like she would

We need poetry . . . We deserve poetry We owe it to ourselves to re-create ourselves and find a different if not better way to live

I mine the human soul For undiscovered strength.

Poems have serious business to do They need to bring down presidents who Start wars they themselves wouldn't go to

once a snowflake fell on my brow and i loved it so much and i kissed it and it was happy and called its cousins and brothers and a web of snow engulfed me then i reached to love them all and i squeezed them and they became a spring rain and i stood perfectly still and was a flower Winter Poem

The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the world or do things is the enemy, patriarchy in medicine, patriarchy in schools, or in literature.

All we can do, I believe, is take the love and give the love and try to remember who dreamed dreams of us. And try to be faithful to that.

People are making the most unbelievable statements about the other based on that kind of insistence that the person who disagrees with you fundamentally can't exist. These are political statements as well as biological and everything else.

This is for equality ... men and women ... blacks and whites ... jews and arabs ... oriental-occidental ... dreamers and the blind ... brilliant and the dumb ... all equal because we have decided ... they are equal ... it's a good system ...

I am from Appalachia. The Tennessee mountains with the early evenings and that great morning light made storytellers out of all of us.

It is interesting that a guy like W.E.B. Du Bois, who actually did very little, I should imagine, with his hands, wrote about I am the smoke king. Without the labor, both free and slave, of African Americans this country would still be a wilderness.

Love is in short supply Like leaves on a winter vine Whether it's right or whether it's wrong I'll pay the price for mine